I got hit on by a hot Swede last night who totally wanted to sleep with me

...too bad it was a guy. But if I ever want to gay it up in Stockholm...

So I got a job as a bartender. Here's what that was like:

First, what everyone told me about how Swedish people speak English is totally, completely, almost entirely true. I only had a couple people that I couldn't understand. The trick is, when they start speaking Swedish, you say, "I'm sorry?" and they pause for a minute and then try it in English. It's especially impressive that their fluency stays pretty consistent even as they get drunk.

Notice that I said "stays consistent," not "stays good." While the overall level of English proficiency is pretty high, there are some definite exceptions. In French, if you don't have good pronunciation, your pronunciation usually gets better as you get drunk, because French words tend to trail off at the end. The more you slur your speech, the closer you get to the way the words are actually supposed to be pronounced. Not so much with English; if you start out bad, it stays bad.

Also, there is a surprising similarity between the words "bottle," "water," and "vodka." This caused a LOT of confusion until I realized what was going on. Then I would ask "waaaterrr? no? bottle of beer? ok, sweet." The Swedish word for bottle seems to be "Flask."

The bar was decent, but in my completely unbiased opinion, my bar was incredibly more functional. Sure they had all 18 different flavors of Absolut, but they didn't have Bailey's, Kahlua, amaretto, or Jager. Are you kidding me? A bar without Baileys? No Jager? Then, to make matters worse, they ran out of shot glasses, gin, plain vodka, ice, and coke. Really? You have 450 people show up at this club and only have one bottle of gin? I was serving shots in brandy snifters and rum and cokes without ice OR coke.

Swedes have a love of having things "just so"...not too much, not too little. Think of them as a nation of Goldilocks. Most of the time, this could not be further from the way I operate... "excess" is pretty much a way of life for me. However, there are some things where there is a "right way" to do it, and that's how I'm going to do it. Bartending is one example. If I'm going to serve a mint julep, it's going to have fresh crushed mint leaves in the bottom. That's why I found the situation at this bar so distressing. They didn't even have the basic materials to do things right, much less the accoutrement to really do it right.

In every place that I've worked, the bartenders split the tips from the tip jar at the end of the night, so I was expecting the same here. I wasn't expecting a lot...I'd been warned about the poor tipping practices of the Swedish...but people were still tipping a small amount through the night, so I was eager to find out how much I had made from my hard work. Then, at the very end of the night (5am, after cleaning everything including sweeping and mopping the dance floor and hauling ~15 tables and ~100 chairs from the second floor to the basement pub), the supervisor explained that all the tips are put in a fund to pay for a "staff party" at the end of the semester. Anybody who works at least 4x for the Nation (I'll explain the whole Nation concept in another post) gets invited to the staff party, which is paid for by the bartending tips.

Are you kidding me? That bull would never fly in America (I'm pretty sure there are laws against it). I worked my ass off to earn those tips. But in Socialist Sweden, I'm not surprised. And the result is that, although I will probably work there again, you can bet that I'm not going to be working nearly as hard. When I was delivering pizzas, I didn't run those pizzas to the door so my boss could have an extra cookie at the end of the year. Screw that.

And if they expect me to work there again, they better get their liquor selection figured out. I'm not telling another customer that I can't pour them a shot of Jager because the barmaster wasn't competent enough to order a bottle (also we don't have any shot glasses.)